Vending (Scylla/Charybdis)

Women

While the subject of abortion is never far from the news
cycle, there has been a lot of unusual news this year
regarding contraception and sex education, and the rights of
medical professionals versus those of their female patients:

It is not without
reason that 2012 has been called the Year of the War of
Women. We have tumbled down the rabbit hole, and our fall
does not appear to be slowing.

Many who oppose a woman's right to abortion are
proud to champion a fertilized egg's rights to life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, yet they seem to
possess slight regard for those same rights when that egg
becomes a woman. Collectively they have donated a
tremendous amount of money towards electing politicians who
think as they do.

Politicians who will remove sex education
curricula from schools, with the predictable result that
many girls won't know the connections between pregnancy and
specific sexual activities.

Politicians who will limit or
even eliminate access to various forms of birth control,
ensuring that girls who have sex are almost certain to
get pregnant.

And politicians who will ensure that, once
pregnant, a girl will deliver her fertilized egg to term --
even if pregnancy complications might kill her in the
process.

Insert dollar, get baby. The anti-choice political
machine in action. From this comes "Vending", which I feel
should be dedicated to women everywhere.

The most obvious element is the dollar, inserted
into the woman's body from the left as though into a vending
machine. The "INSERT FACE UP" directions are also meant to
recall the Missionary Position favored by certain religious
types as the only God-sanctioned position for procreative
acts.

The dollar fuels the religious/political engine of
enforced procreation, so its representation here has been
altered to reflect that fact. The Federal Reserve seal
on the left is now an ovum, apparently bristling with
concave receptacles for sperm. Letters have been
elided from the "legal tender" notice above it, which now
contains common words in our political discourse around
choice: "HIS, NOT I; LEGAL FOR ALL, PUBLIC". The word
"PRIVATE" is obscured and so appropriately absent. Also
prominent are the words "FEDERAL" and "STATES", both
intruding into the woman's body much as the political
entities do. Finally we have what those dollars are
ostensibly purchasing: "THE [family] UNIT".

What of the woman herself? From her breasts to her womb
she possesses conventional anatomy, because to certain
religious institutions this is a woman's primary function.
Outside of those she is monstrous. A woman may have a brain
and an independent will (represented by her head),
non-procreative sexual desires (legs), and a skill for
activities other than child-rearing (hands), but to some
people these are regarded as mere pathways to sin. So I have
depicted each as an evil force of its own:

The snake head represents the perception of woman
as the source of Original Sin. It recalls the serpent in
the Garden of Eden, who tempted Eve to eat the fruit of the
Tree of Knowledge (shown here as the
conventional apple). The apple is ringed by
an ouroboros, another mystical serpent representing
an endless cycle which serves here as a metaphor for the
transmission of knowledge (and sin) from mother to daughter.
But duality abounds in symbols. The coiled snake is also an
element of the Rod
of Asclepius, a symbol of health and healing.

Between the apple and the ouroboros is a symbol that many
Christians would take for a
demonic pentacle.
Yet a closer examination reveals Greek letters at the
vertices. To the ancient Greeks, the
pentagram
symbolized "hugieia": health and wholeness. It
also stood for the the Greek goddess of health, Hygieia,
from which we get the word "hygiene".
The point-upward pentagram is also the symbol of
the Wiccan (woman-centered) pagan religion. And of course,
the five-pointed star is one of the symbols of America herself.

As for the torque around the woman's neck: that's just
the lower part of the Federal Reserve Seal on the dollar
where the city is shown. Really I just liked the look of it, but
the metaphor of "government around our necks" works too.

The lizard legs/tail, as of a dragon, represent
the perceived threat of women's non-procreative sexuality.
The spiral tail fades into yet another dual-natured symbol
that recalls both peril and beneficence: the
labyrinth.
Three labyrinths are shown: the triple-spiral superimposed
over the tip of the tail, the circular maze behind it, and
the
labyrinth of Chartres in
the background. At the heart of the Cretan labyrinth lay
the perilous minotaur, half human and half beast, a potent
metaphor for unbridled sexuality. Yet labyrinths, like
the one at Chartres, are also
used for holy contemplation and meditation.

The spirals and the watery form of the Chartres labyrinth
also evoke the whirlpool and the legend of the
Charybdis,
which in Greek mythology was also a nymph turned into a sea
monster and later identified with a whirlpool. Charybdis was paired
with Scylla,
other nymph-turned-monster, which I have intended as another interpretation
of the woman's head. The expression
"caught
between Scylla and Charybdis" means "trapped between two
dangers" or two difficult choices. If Scylla is the woman's
head and Charybdis the feet, then midway between them is her
womb. So the visual metaphor is particularly appropriate,
given the nature of the pro/anti-choice dilemma that our
society faces. No matter which way the laws come down,
someone's going to be unhappy.

(Appropriately enough for the day, Scylla and Charybdis were
also the names of two of the three cats that watched over my
cradle after I was brought home from the hospital: a Siamese
and an Abyssinian respectively.)

The multiple arms and hands symbolize a woman's
capability (and desire) to devote her life to other
activities besides motherhood. This, too, is seen as
abberant or monstrous by some people. In Hindu
representational artwork, the multiple arms of a deity (such
as Kali)
symbolize power and the ability to perform several acts at
the same time. Here, the rightmost arm may be recognized as
that of the Statue of Liberty -- woman's liberty
being the essence of what is at stake.

The "2" on the woman's hand represents the notion
that a pregnant woman is no longer a single entity but
a chimera. Remember, you're eating for 2 now.
This is reinforced by the two "1"s on the bill itself,
which also stand for the separate male and female components of
fertilization shown on the bill. 1 + 1 = 2.

The fetus purchased by anti-sex-education, anti-contraception,
and anti-abortion dollars is
nestled in the oval that normally ensconces Washington, the
"father" of our country. Coming out of it is the
umbilicus, the symbol of that which is also born but
which is ignored or forgotten. The umbilicus is haloed by
the treasury seal (attesting to its true parentage).
Note the arrows leading off to the right, a continuation of
the path of the inserted dollar. The umbilicus symbolizes
unchecked population growth and all the social and
environmental ills that come with it. The number
"7040400000", rendered as the serial number of a
dollar bill, is in
fact the
rough world population on the morning of Mother's Day
2012: seven billion, forty million, four hundred thousand.

Finally, in the background are two passages from
"Alice in Wonderland", representing the topsy-turvy nightmare
that American girls have fallen into. On the left
is the passage where Alice's neck has grown long and
serpent-like, and a passing Pigeon sqwaks that she is a Serpent:

`But I'm NOT a serpent, I tell you!' said
Alice. `I'm a— I'm a—'

`Well! WHAT are you?' said the Pigeon. `I can see
you're trying to invent something!'

`I—I'm a little girl,' said Alice, rather
doubtfully, as she remembered the number of changes she had
gone through that day.

`A likely story indeed!' said the Pigeon in a tone
of the deepest contempt. `I've seen a good many little girls
in my time, but never ONE with such a neck as that! No, no!
You're a serpent; and there's no use denying it. I suppose
you'll be telling me next that you never tasted an egg!'

`I HAVE tasted eggs, certainly,' said Alice, who was
a very truthful child; `but little girls eat eggs quite as
much as serpents do, you know.'

`I don't believe it,' said the Pigeon; `but if they do,
why then they're a kind of serpent, that's all I can say.'

On the right, Alice rescues a baby...

'If I don't take this child away
with me,' thought Alice, 'they're sure to kill it in a
day or two: wouldn't it be murder to leave it behind?

...only to discover that the end result is not what she hoped
it would be, as described by her conversation with the Cheshire
Cat going up the right hand edge:

‘By-the-bye, what became of the baby? I'd almost forgotten to ask.’

‘It turned into a pig,’ Alice quietly said.

‘I thought it would,’ said the Cat, and vanished again.

Some social conservatives are very much concerned with
bringing new babies into the world, yet they don't seem
particularly concerned with the care and feeding of those
babies once they exit the womb. Cutbacks in social welfare
programs, in education, in neonatal care for the poor, in
environmental oversight, all fuel a system geared to
producing an ever-increasing number of consumers, cheap
laborers, and cannon-fodder. The rich get richer, and in so
doing spend ever-increasing amounts to convince the pious to
pump more funds into the fetus-making machine.

As usual, I used
the GIMP for the digital
editing, and my Wacom tablet.

I started with
the dollar when assembling the composition; it provided many
of the design elements used throughout the work. The ellipse of
the portrait suggested a womb, so I knew I needed to find
a fetus to go inside. There was
a fetus drawn by Leonardo Da Vinci
which I'd wanted to use in a composition
for two years, so that was my obvious choice. To give the
impression of an ultrasound, I flipped the portrait oval
and the word above it into a negative.

Of course I needed a woman around the womb. I considered
various depictions of the Madonna, but eventually stumbled upon
a wax model
from sciencemuseum.org
(catalog number A600051-Pt5). The title is: "Wax plaque
showing a dissected female figure, Europe, 1801-1830." The
note is "The female figure in this plaque had been dissected
to show the kidneys, uterus and the blood vessels that
supply the lower part of the body with blood."

I don't normally work with photorealistic images, so I tried a new
technique: Gimp has a filter for "cartoonifying" a photo, picking out
the edges and rendering them as lines. I basically went with a
mask radius of 5 to 7 pixels and a black percent from 0.2 to 0.5,
depending on the source image. Then I generally desturated the
result and played with the hues to make various elements mesh.
I was very happy with the results.

The head and neck was created by applying this technique to a
photo of a green snake
I found on the web. The snake was eventually tracked down
to LEAPS, an environmental consulting service.
The umbilicus was
another green snake.

The legs/tail were a nightmare. I knew I wanted a scaly
spiral. I tried snakes, seahorses, everything I could think
of. I almost began drawing them damned thing by hand, but
happily I discovered that
the tail of a chameleon.
has exactly the look I was after. This was
the best one I could find; it's apparently
an iPhone wallpaper.
Still I had to do a lot of
work on it: flipping it, tuning the colors, and slicing and
warping it so that it would serve convincingly as thighs,
legs, and tail -- even with the subtle suggestion of a knee
joint. I made heavy use of the "IWarp" filter on this one.

The piece grew pretty much from the center outwards. I had no idea
of the final design when I started. I let the picture elements decide.
I love that the final shape of the woman's body looks like a violin's f-hole.

What you can't see is all the stuff I threw away. I still
wish I could have given her a fourth arm -- I tried
Liberty's torch, an arm holding the Scales of Justice, even
the arm of Rosie the Riveter from the "We Can Do It" poster.
Nothing worked, either visually or thematically. I also
wanted to have something on Liberty's tablet, but everything
I put there seemed hackneyed and dull.

In the end I relied heavily on advice from my lady, Deborah,
to guide the piece when I was caught between Scylla
and Charybdis during my various false starts. She very
patiently looked at numerous versions over the two weeks
spent on this project, and endured my occasional bouts
frustration when a day's effort had to be tossed aside
because it just plain didn't fly.

Deborah also told me about the
horror vacui;
the fear of empty space in artwork, which (it seems) is one of my
personal demons. I keep trying to shove more and more crap into the
frame. When you do that, the eye doesn't know where to rest, and nothing
makes sense. I still try to sneak in subtle elements by making them
small, ghostly, or even blurry. Sometimes it just matters to me
that they're in there, even if only at a subliminal or personal
level.

The true boundary of the piece is the center
rectangle where most of the content is, but since my mom
displays these in 8-by-10 frames I knew I needed to resize
the final piece and give it a suitable border to fill the
space. I chose to extend the arrows to either side, since
the money and the ever-escalating population effectively
escape the frame of the events depicted here. I also did a
special ghostly extension of the tail to envelop the
signature, and nudged the neck out slightly. By design, the
neck was slightly cut off by the upper-left border of the
original frame, but when the whole thing was put together it
just looked abnormally thin.